AAAI Technical Report FS-12-08
Social Networks and Social Contagion
Preface
Samarth Swarup and Madhav Marathe
Virginia Tech
Kiran Lakkaraju
Noshir Contractor
Sandia National Laboratory
Northwestern University
Milind Tambe
Winter Mason
University of Southern California
Stevens Institute of Technology
With the emergence of Computational Social Science as
a field of collaboration between computer scientists and social scientists, the study of social networks and processes on
these networks (social contagion) has been gaining interest.
Many topics of traditional sociological interest (such as the
diffusion of innovation, emergence of norms, identification
of influencer) can now be studied using detailed computational models and extensive simulation.
c 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Copyright Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
The advent and popularity of online social media also
allows the creation of massive data sets which can inform
models and underlying sociological theory. The ubiquity of
”smart devices” (such as smart phones) also provides opportunities to gather extensive data on the behaviors and interactions of humans in ”real space”. The goal of this symposium
is to bring together a community of researchers interested
in addressing these issues and to encourage interdisciplinary
approaches to these problems.